What is Information Literacy
Information literacy is about developing your skills in finding, evaluating, using and managing information. The United States National Forum on Information Literacy defines information literacy as "... the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand."
Information Literacy is knowing when and why you need information, where to find it, how to evaluate, use and communicate in an ethical manner (ALA 2005).
Information literacy is accepted to be a core competency to be developed in an increasingly complex information society.
Finding Information
Finding the relevant information from the Internet may be as tedious as searching for a needle in the haystack. When you search for information on the Net you will be flooded with irrelevant search results. There are many pretty cool features in the search engines, especially on Google, to help you find information quickly. All the browsers allows you to set your preferred search engine when you are using search from address bar feature (this feature can be disabled too if you do not want the browser to kick start a search when you type other than an existing URL). If you know the advanced search features offered by the search engines, your chance of finding the right information will increase.
Search Engines
A search engine is a web service that uses web robots to query millions of pages on the Internet and creates an index of those web pages. Search engines make use of programs called spider, also known as a robot or a crawler, to "craw;" through the Internet finding website and the links throughout the Internet and creates an index of the sites they find.
Web Directories
A web directory—also known as a subject directory—lists websites by subject and is usually maintained by humans instead of software. A user enters search terms and looks at the returned links in a series of categories and menus, typically organized from broadest to narrowest in focus.
Examples of web directories are : HotFrog (https://www.hotfrog.in/); DMOZ (The Open Directory Project which was closed down in 2017, the directory is available now at http://dmoztools.net/) and The WWW Virtual Library
Google Search Tips
Google is the most popular search engine on the Internet. In fact, "googled" is being used as a synonym for "searched" now. Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing are other search engines available for us.
Generally, Google will use all the words used in your search for finding results. So only use the
important keywords to search. No need to include special characters or punctuations in your
queries.
Search engines are NOT case sensitive. So whether you are searching for India, india or INDIA, all will fetch you the same number of results. Google Search usually ignores punctuation that isn’t part of a search operator.
The following keywords or symbols can be used in Google to get the best out of it. Remember not to put spaces between the symbol or word and your search term. You may try doing the given examples, to see how Google get the results.
Search for an exact match: Put a word or phrase inside quotes to get an exact match. This is highly efficient when you are searching for a book title or a song. For example, try searching for "Importance of Gandhian thoughts about Cleanliness" with and without quotes and see the difference in the number of results.
Search within a specific site: You can search within a specific site by adding site:URL to
your search keyword with e.g admission guidelines site:kvsangathan.nic.in
Search for a specific file type: To search for a specific file type like Word Document or PDF
or PPTs or XLS files add filetype:ext (file extension) with your search keyword. E.g. cyber security filetype:docx (will get only Word documents as search results)
Exclude words from your search: To exclude some words from your search put a ‘-‘ (minus
sign) just in front of the word. Do not leave any space. E.g. computer security –wikipedia
Find Related Pages: The tag related: can be used to find pages similar to a site you know.
E.g. related:kvsangathan.nic.in will get you all sites that are related to KVS Website. The tag
Link will fetch you the pages linked to a particular page.
Search within a Range: You can search within a range. If you narrow down your search
within a particular period or numerical range you can use … (three dots) in between the two
values. E.g. camera 5000...10000 . Similarly if you search for camera INR 5000, it will get you cameras under INR 5000.
Use wildcards for unknown words: Put a * in your word or phrase where you are not sure of the word(s) . For example, "largest * in the world"
Search in Page Title: Intitle keyword will fetch results from those pages which has the search
term in the title of the page. Try searching intitle:kvklibrary
Search social media: Put @ in front of a word to search social media. For example: @twitter.
Number Conversions: You can easily get number conversions or measurement conversions
or rupee conversions by typing in the number and unit of measurement. E.g. 10 km to miles will
convert and show the result on top of the search results.
Search Time: To get the time anywhere in the world type time place. E.g time brazil
Get Definition: Just add define: in front of your search term to get the definition. Normally Google will automatically give you the definition if you search for a term or a word
Translate: Get translation of a word in another language E.g. wind in hindi
Calculate: Type the math equation you want to solve in Google
Get Flight Status: Try the flight number E.g. air india flight 234
ISBN Search: You can enter the ISBN of a book directly to get the book details.
Try searching for ISBN : 8173711461
Book Search: Click on the Books link on the left in Google search to get the book details or
go to books.google.com to search for books
Google Search Tools: The tools option under the search box in Google help you filter your
results based on many criteria like time or country. Google Image Search offers many features
like image size, image colour, image type, currency and usage rights.You can search the
Internet using you mobile’s camera with Google Goggles app installed.
Other Search Engines
You may try Bing (bing.com) or dogpile.com instead of Google. One of the good search engines
available is DuckDuckGo (http://duckduckgo.com) which do not track the visitors. If privacy is a
concern, you may try it.
Kiddle is a safe visual search engine for kids.
Kiddle is a safe visual search engine for kids.
Multimedia Search
The following search engines/sites can be used to find audio/videos online.
http://www.bing.com/videos/browse
http://www.tineye.com/: It lets you do a reverse image search i.e you can find similar images by
uploading an image to TiyEye or you can just type in the URL of the image and you can search
an image by colour.
Desktop Search Tools
The following free desktop search tools that can be downloaded from the Internet are highly
useful in searching you PC for files.
Everything: A small but efficient utility which will help you to locate files and folders by name
instantly
Launchy: Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!
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